As a recent transplant to this desert and a downtown resident, that’s what I thought one morning when I jogged toward the Fifth Avenue bridge over Interstate 10 and was jarred out of my daze by the frenzied squawking of about a dozen little green-and-red birds.

They were hopping around in the gravel under a paloverde tree, either trying to get at something or, perhaps, just being crazy little birds. I slowed and walked past them with my mouth open, but they didn’t care about me. They kept hopping and squawking.

That day at the office I searched online for “Phoenix” and “parrot” and found the rosy-faced lovebird.

These birds, formerly known as peach-faced lovebirds, are immigrants who took up residence in the Sonoran Desert long before I did, when people started bringing them here as pets or aviary exhibits. They’re natives of southwest Africa — deserts in Angola, Namibia and South Africa.

Troy Corman of the Arizona Field Ornithologists, an organization of birders and professionals dedicated to public knowledge of the state’s avian inhabitants, was unsurprised by my fascination.

“These spunky and noisy, bright-green birds seem to attract a lot of attention,” he said.

Their unpredictable visits to city parks and backyard bird baths are said to be huge hits with residents, but the birds are not common sights. Most people I’ve spoken to immediately knew the birds I was talking about but had seen them just once or twice.

Corman co-wrote his organization’s status report on the lovebirds of Phoenix, explaining that they’ve been on the loose as feral flocks since at least the mid-1980s. Their breeding success here — and only here, among places the birds may have escaped within the United States — apparently owes to the comfortably dry and warm climate, ready availability of water and good supply of foods from native and exotic plants, including palm fruit, cactus fruit, apples and various seed pods, including the paloverde’s.

As with any invasive species, there’s a wariness about this bird’s potential effect on natives. But Corman believes there’s little potential conflict, in part because the birds depend on exotic plants found only in the city, such as the loose, untrimmed palm fronds under which they nest.

The exact population is unknown, but a 2010 census detected about 950 in the Valley.

There is, by the way, a parrot native to Arizona forests, although it’s generally found only in Mexico these days. The thick-billed parrot is on America’s endangered-species list.

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